cause she's bringing me down
by mostlymaggie
Summary: He is sixteen to her twenty-five when they first meet.


**Okay, this is the only one that had nothing to do with a fanmix. I just sort of... Got to writing, and this came about. I'm pretty sure it's not entirely canon compliant (especially if you subscribe to the idea that Derek Hale is 19, like that portion of the script floating around suggests), but, uh... Here it is anyways?**

* * *

He is sixteen to her twenty-five when they first meet.

She's older, a lot older, which is something he hadn't thought much about in the past (he's concerned with just navigating high school and _its_ dating pool - thinking about older women who aren't on a television or computer screen isn't exactly a top priority), but man, is he ever interested. Right away, he appreciates the fact that she's clearly capable of taking care of herself (she moves with a grace he rarely sees in humans, and her body looks like it is the perfect balance between hard lines of muscle and plush curves beneath her clothes).

The first few times they talk, he can't wrap his head around why she would be interested in _him_ - Derek Hale, sixteen and needlessly broody even now, hiding what he is and avoiding extracurriculars like it's a job. He's convinced that she's messing with him at first, a prank set up by some high school girl he turned down or some guy he'd managed to piss off just by showing him up in class, but he never sees any signs of it - no speeding, skipping heartbeats or darting eyes, no sweating or nervous flush. She doesn't seem all that bothered by his age; in fact, she tells him that he's the most mature person she's met in a long time, several times.

They go out for the first time a few days after his seventeenth birthday. He says 'go out', and he means it; there were no real plans to meet up, but she shows up outside his house at six o'clock and they end up at the local diner and stay through dinner and several servings of dessert. Not long after that, they're together, though only in the loosest sense, he thinks - they're not mated, she isn't marked, and no, they're never _dating_ because Kate is nearly ten years his senior and they don't want anyone calling the cops (which neither of them think is likely, but better safe than sorry).

By his eighteenth birthday, he's almost positive that he loves her. They've been together (in an official, 'update your relationship status on the internet' capacity, anyways) for three months. _Technically_, they've been together for nine, but since the first few months consist of a lot of secrets - secret meetings, his lycanthropy, among other things, - he doesn't count them.

Three months later, while he and Laura are at school, the house burns. The only survivor is their uncle Peter, and considering the fact that the man is comatose and covered in burns, probably aware of the immense pain somewhere in the deepest parts of his mind, 'surviving' is hardly what he does.

For the first two weeks after the fire, he doesn't think it's all that strange that he hasn't seen Kate. He's made no effort to contact her, hasn't even gone back to the house to _see_ the damage yet. When he finally does, he understands. Kate has only been to his house once, when she met him there _months_ ago, just after he'd turned seventeen, but her scent is everywhere - in the trees, on the front porch, around the back near the cellar door. He doesn't want to admit it, but he knows, between her scent being damn near overwhelming and mixed with kerosene and gasoline and a number of other accelerants, he knows that she had something to do with this.

He finds out from her family - or rather, the fact that her family took up a full page in the local paper congratulating her on going _somewhere_ for a job - that she's been gone since two days after the fire, and he curses himself for being so stupid. He'd never asked for her last name, never thought it was important - but knowing, now, that she wasn't just _Kate_, Kate who could take care of herself and throw him on his ass and hold her own in an argument, but she was Kate _Argent_, Kate of a prominent werewolf hunting family... It stings.

Him and Laura leave Beacon Hills two days later, and he still can't bring himself to tell her that _he's_ the reason their entire family is dead.


End file.
